Q (film)

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This page is about the 1982 film, for the Star Trek character please see Q (Star Trek).

Q (also known as The Winged Serpent and as Q - The Winged Serpent) is a 1982 horror film written and directed by Larry Cohen and starring David Carradine, Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark and Richard Roundtree.

The film's premise is that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the "winged serpent", has been resurrected by a cult in modern New York City and is flying about, snatching people off the skyscrapers. Carradine and Roundtree play police detectives investigating the sudden rash of suspicious deaths, disappearances and dismemberings. Meanwhile a petty criminal (Moriarty), on the run after a failed robbery, accidentally discovers the creature's lair and tries to blackmail the city into paying for the information.

Q is laced with Cohen's trademark throwaway humour. Confronted with the mysterious death of a window cleaner, a detective reasons "maybe his head got loose and fell off"; and later someone speculates that the monster may have come to the Big Apple because "New York is famous for good eating".

Like Cohen's earlier God Told Me To, Q notes the similarities between gods and monsters; at one point Carradine's character speculates that the only real difference between the two is that monsters can be killed.